Statement Concerning Events at London Met

As students of the UfSO, and as internationalists, we extend our solidarity to the unjustly-maligned students of London Metropolitan University.

These students, through no fault of their own, are having their lives potentially seriously damaged. Why? As a result of the pathetic attempt to scoop a racist headline on the part of an illegitimate government of rich. This governement of the rich, who toy with students’ lives in order to massage their arbitrary immigration targets, are the same rich who themselves are able to travel at will, and who have already bought their way into the ‘best’ universities. They deserve, and indeed receive, nothing but our utmost contempt.

Yet this is more than a heartless piece of figure-massaging. There is a real danger that this is a thinly-veiled attempt at pushing for the full privatisation – under the guise of rescue – of a university already betrothed to a host of the familiar outsourcing parasites we have come to know and loathe. Meanwhile it reeks of an opportunist attack on a university with one of the broadest intakes of students in the country, and some callous attempt to ram home the malicious, elitist dream of a two-tier higher education system.

Make no mistake, part of their class plan, when introducing, and then raising fees to exorbitant levels, was not only the marketisation of university, but also the degradation of critical thinking, and its enclosure in the hands of a few members of their trusted class. Now they are pushing an agenda that seeks to forcibly divide higher education – under-resourced, private training camps for the masses, ivory-white towers, with wet-dreaming spires for the few.

We say no! When they wanted to shift the burden of paying for education from society to the student, it was the international student they came for first. We did not resist and they came for the rest. Not only are they fully prepared to ruin several thousand people’s lives, simply in order to look tough to morons in thrall to the tabloid ballot-box fiction of pseudo-democratic piggy politics. If they succeed here, they will potentially use their bureaucratic horseshit over immigration to financially undermine any university they please, deploying it as a weapon to further their privatisation agenda. Having turned higher education into an international marketplace, they no doubt will seek to use the financial instability caused by this as cover for further marketisation. They seek to use the increasingly crisis-prone folly of an already over-marketised system to further the cause of marketisation – where have we heard that before? In this they see international students as nothing but cannon fodder in their class war. They want to make pawns of people’s lives for their pathetic, cowardly and racist agenda, an agenda they will inflict under the tattered, union jack umbrella of popular jingoism that so often characterises this jaded, spiteful country.

As the real bogus students of the UfSO, we extend our solidarity to the falsely decried students, suffering the life-ruining personal consequences of the risible, racist manipulations of a powerful clique intent on divide and rule. Fuck that, and fuck the nondescript camp-guards of the UKBA (the Bureaucratic Arsehole division of the Unaccountable Kingdom) who enforce this trash.

We demand the immediate removal of any threat of deportation for any London Met. students.

We call for the non-co-operation of all universities, their staff and students, in the enforcement of the government’s racist policing of international students. Are we here to learn and teach, or to act as the government’s proxy border police force?

We politely request that the NUS cease pretending to represent the interests of students and admit that their organisation is a hatchery for sycophants seeking to suck and lick their way into parliamentary politics. Or else prove us wrong. No? Didn’t think so.

We call for the abolition of the UKBA and the resignation, followed preferably by the jailing, of this entire illegitimate and dangerous government. It is not fit for purpose.

The University for Strategic Optimism ceased active operations in Sept 2013

This blog has been preserved for archive purposes and in the hope that future comrades in the ongoing struggle might find some of its experiences useful. For more information on the group's former activities the 'UfSO Timeline', the 'UfSO Photograph Archive', or the post 'UfSO: (a)History and Classroom Consciousness' are a good place to start.

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